


the ceiling's coming down

by somethingdifferent



Category: Breaking Bad
Genre: Gen, Post Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-27
Updated: 2014-05-27
Packaged: 2018-01-26 19:17:12
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,883
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1699580
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/somethingdifferent/pseuds/somethingdifferent
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>People have been watching her since she was a child with a science fair project on photosynthesis. Waiting to see if she cracks. Who she will grow up to become.</p><p>There's no escaping something like blood.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the ceiling's coming down

**Author's Note:**

> So this idea got into my head and would not leave it. Chalk the following up to reading a couple of Holly White fics, too much Cormac McCarthy, and taking too many courses on developmental psych.

> _she was fifteen years old and she never seen the ocean_   
> _ she climbed into a van with a vagabond _  
> _ and the last thing she said was, "i love you mom"  
> and a little rain never hurt no one_ 
> 
> TOM WAITS
> 
>  
> 
> _ walking down an icy grave _   
>  _ leading to my schizophrenic father_   
>  _ weeping willow, won't you wallow louder? _   
>  _ searching for my father's power_
> 
> COCOROSIE

 

 

 

On days she has chem lab, Holly takes the long way home. She kicks her feet at the cracks in the pavement, once nearly tripping from her efforts, crunches every leaf along the narrow sidewalk. Cracked and split wide open pavement. It's fall. The sky is pale, not quite blue, and the warm reprieve that summer brought has slid back into something colder. Meaner. There were horror stories back in New Mexico when the weather turned like this, about kids getting lost in the middle of the desert and freezing to death. Their bodies torn open and picked clean by buzzards, till nothing remained but bleached bone and gory pieces left to rot on the sand. Burning like nothing more than meat. Even two decades later, there are still some urban legends about the ghosts of some cops who got shot in the middle of the desert. They're still there, they say sometimes, the two of them. Hunting for revenge. Wailing for their widows.

 

 

 

She holds her hand up to the sun. When she was a little girl, back when all the names her father took were barely on the fringes of her awareness, she used to think that the sun was small enough to hold in her hand. She got bigger and so did the sun. Burning a hole in the sky. Burning a hole in her back. Holly walks slower and slower as she nears the apartment. The smell of chemicals and fire clings to her like perfume.

 

 

 

Is this what her father smelled like? When he came home from work? But which job, the one in the closed-down school, or the one miles beneath the earth? His personality must have changed hands a dozen times over. The chemicals must have changed on his skin. Became something new. Every time, without fail. Evolving. Transforming.

 

 

 

Holly stomps her feet on the walk down the hallway, jingles her keys at the latch, sighs audibly as she opens the door. She hums as she drops her backpack onto the couch. "I'm home," she says to the apartment. The apartment doesn't reply. 

 

 

 

She makes dinner. "All latchkey kids should know how to cook a proper meal," Aunt Marie had said once, when Holly was in high school and mom was working longer and longer hours. Her mother had glared at her sister until she shrugged, eyes wide and palms face-up, like a mock prayer. Holly makes herself lasagna, burns her fingers on the pan as she pulls it from the oven. The metal clatters on the counter as she drops it. She runs her hands under the cold water, until the skin has faded from red back to white. Her phone buzzes, but she lets it ring through.

 

 

 

The screen tells her she missed a call from Flynn. Holly tosses the little chunk of metal toward the couch, promising herself she'll call him back later when she has more time. If she remembers. Talking to her brother was never easy even before she knew anything about her father, even before she went off for school in a subject that makes every member of her family flinch. Most of her conversations with him are scripted like ones between curious family friends or barely acquainted cousins. "You'll get to spend more time with him once you're both grown," her mother had always told her. Flynn is busy with school/work/money. Always has been, Holly.

 

 

 

"What are you think-thinking of majoring in?" Flynn had asked over the phone once her senior year. Holly had sighed, twisted her finger through her blonde curls. The same corn-stalk color as her mother's. She worked out a knot with a deft hand as she shifted the phone to her other ear.

"I don't know," she said. "Maybe chemistry? I like science." They had moved on to another topic shortly after. When she hung up, Holly called her brother by a name he gave himself.

 

 

 

She eats alone in front of the TV, watches a reality show she can't remember the name of. When she's finished, she cleans the dishes in the sink, stacks them neatly in the drying rack. "All done," she says aloud to the apartment. It doesn't say anything back.

 

 

 

She goes out onto the balcony, if it can be called that. There's a folding chair on the cement floor, three feet across, just enough for her to stretch out her long, long legs. It gets cold in Seattle, though, so she doesn't stay out long. Just looks out over the city, the lights of the other apartment buildings as they go on and off. Like stars twinkling. Holly pulls out a cigarette she lifted off of her mother the last time she visited. Considers the bent white shape of it. She doesn't know why she took it. She doesn't know why she kept it. Holly drops it over the two story edge and goes back inside.

 

 

 

It's awful, if you think about it. Here you are, nothing more than a slip of a girl. Blonde hair, blue eyes. Already towering over half the boys in the class. Amazonian, Aunt Marie calls it. Sasquatch, you call it. You're only really good at science classes, chemistry and physics, because languages are flighty and irregular and philosophy courses ask for relativism she cannot give. If a man steals a loaf of bread to feed his family, is it stealing? Yes, it's always stealing. What happens to the man losing the money? What happens to his child? You're not getting the point, Holly. _There's no fucking point to get_. Her father is dead in the ground, but Heisenberg is still a shadow, a monster biting at her heels. She is her father's daughter, with chemicals staining her fingers and equations in her notebooks and Walt Whitman in her head. There's no escaping something like blood.

 

* * *

 

Her mother calls. She gets worried, Holly being so far from home. Seattle is just about as far as you can get from New Mexico, the gray and the cold and the rain. "Are you alright?" her mother asks when she calls on Sundays. The answer is always the same: just fine. Holly thinks it's likely the truth, but she lost track of the line between honesty and falsehood a long time ago. She's predisposed to never quite know the difference.

 

 

 

She wakes up to the sound of rain falling on the roof. Thunder rumbling toward the city. When Holly was eight, New Mexico suffered a drought, the worst in years. The grass on the lawn of their apartment building all shrunk up and dead. Her mother sleeping in front of the fan in the kitchen. The heat oppressive and unyielding. "I'm sorry, baby," her mother used to say sometimes. Crying in the kitchen without any tears. Dehydration. The burning, burning heat at the back of her neck. "I'm so sorry."

 

 

 

She wakes up to the gray light seeping through the curtains. The rain battering the glass. The eggshell curtains. The neat, crisp lines of her white bedspread and cool, soft sheets. Holly rubs her wrist against the hollows of her eyes, back and forth, hard against the bones of her cheek. The inside of her hand the color of milk. She's gotten paler since moving up north. Aunt Marie says sometimes that she looks sick. "You need some sun, dear."

 

 

 

She buys coffee before class. Black, strong. The life of a student, she jokes to her mother. An acquired taste, her old roommate used to call it. Why would you want to acquire it then? Holly spills some of the hot liquid over her hands, staining them dark as she reels back, sets it against the counter and hisses at the sting. She frowns, can practically hear Aunt Marie warning against getting wrinkles. Holly has a bad temper, frowns too often, gets lines between her eyes and around her mouth. Bitchy, someone once called it. Toxic stress, one of her psych professors said in high school. Early childhood events have a greater impact than you would think. Things ruin you so easily.

 

 

 

Her father kidnapped her once, she knows this. It was a big news event at the time. When she was old enough, according to Flynn at least, her mother went through all of it, all the details of the Heisenberg case. The money and the drugs and the bodies in the ground. The accomplices, the ones dead and alive and locked up and in the wind. Jesse Pinkman was one of them, the kid who disappeared from the last scene and never showed up again. Her mother was another. "This is everything I know," she had said, twisting her narrow hands together. Holly still doubts that.

 

 

 

Goes to her classes during the day. It comes easy to her, the math. The balancing of numbers and letters and symbols. A couple of nights a week, she has lab, goes to campus in her steel-toed boots and short hair in knots behind her head. Her mother used to wonder why she kept it so short, cut so close to her scalp, considering her long, thin limbs, the smooth lines of her ribs under her collarbone, her thick glasses obscuring her pale eyes. _Such a beauty_ , a great-aunt once told her, voice pitying and humming. _Like an angel_. _Such a waste_.

 

 

 

Here is her first memory: she's nearly asleep, in her crib. The wood bars surrounding her. Safe and enclosed, the sunlight streaming through. A shadow comes up from behind her, making dark her eyelids, and her father smooths his hand over her soft, blonde hair. Holly never knows if the memory is real or fake. She has heard stories of her father so often, she can no longer discern the space between what she has been told and what she knows to be true. She was so, so young. Her father was alive. She was warm, and small. And loved. So very loved.

 

 

 

She calls Flynn on the way to class. Gets his voicemail. "Hey big brother," she says cheerfully into the receiver. "Just wanted to call and say everything's going great. Classes are boring, professors are strict, science, science, blah, blah, blah. Give me a call if you want to talk, but everything's fine up here. I hope everything is going good. One of my friends knows someone in Nashville, I can get his number if you want. He does work with intervention programs there too, so if you wanted to meet him. But yeah. I hope you're doing well. With everything. I hope you're fine. I really hope you're doing fine. I love you. Bye."

 

 

 

Flynn is rich. That's how Aunt Marie phrases it. Paid for his schooling, and now Holly's. Her father's old friends gifted him millions of dollars. For some reason. God knows why. "They felt bad," Flynn tells her. "Because dad wouldn't h-have done what he did if he had money." Yes, he would have, Holly thinks sometimes. Dad was a psychopath. Dad wanted things too much. Flynn is too old to truly hate his father. Holly knows better.

 

 

 

"Your father was a genius," Gretchen Schwartz told her once. She was so small, so breakable looking. "I hope you won't waste your gifts the way he did." Waste her gifts? On what? On cooking crystal meth? People have been watching her since she was a child with a science fair project on photosynthesis. Waiting to see if she cracks. Who she will grow up to become. She didn't get the numbers reeling around in her mother's head, didn't get Uncle Hank's ability to connect the dots, didn't get Flynn's smile or Aunt Marie's clever hands. Just the bitter scent of chemicals under her nails. Molecular formulas. Compounds. Stable and unstable. And her mother's name concealing her father's like a bandage. Holly Lambert, she thinks. Holly White.

 

 

 

Holly is a little morbid, sometimes, overly curious about aspects of the case that no one likes to discuss. Some things they say happened, some things her father did, are shocking, nearly sensational. Sometimes she thinks that they must have all just stopped, just paused in the middle of what they were doing and wondered about what was happening. "This wasn't supposed to be my life," her mother had screamed at Aunt Marie once. Greed is the most dangerous thing, she learned so from an early age. Greed and desperation. They can so easily make you believe you're entitled to something more than what you carved out for yourself.

 

 

 

"Your father was a genius," Gretchen Schwartz told her. And Aunt Marie. And Flynn. And her mother. And Uncle Hank, or would have if he was still alive. If he hadn't died out in the desert at her father's hand. As good as her father's hand. Holly could name every fact about Walter White, if she wanted to. Where he went to school. What his middle name is. What his own father did for a living. She could close her eyes and know every detail of his face, or Jesse Pinkman's, or Gustavo Fring's. She spent most of her formative years uncovering the ruins of her father's memory like something from an archaeological dig. She knows him. Everything about him. And still. And _still_.

 

* * *

 

It starts raining on the way home. The pavement is slick with water, turning the ground black and shining against the street lights. Holly opens up her umbrella, the red nylon fabric stretched tight around the thin metal bars. Thin like spider's legs. She squints at the sky, the mouth of the storm as it rolls through. The dark, swirling center. Lightning flashes, the long, spindly limbs of it stretched out against the sky like fingers reaching.

 

 

 

She only remembers one storm like this from when she was little, when Mom drove them through Missouri on their way to visit some family friends. The black night. The rain washing over the windshield faster than the car could sweep it away. For a second, even as a child, Holly could tell that something was wrong. That her mother was on the edge of panic. They couldn't see more than a few feet in front of them until the sky slowly began to open up again, the moon beginning to shimmer through, wavering against the air like a mirage. Her mother's breathing evened out into countable beats once again, and the car steadied against the yellow lines of the road. The radio played old songs as Holly drifted off, into a deep sleep. She dreamed about miles of strawberry fields. A sad eyed lady lying still against the grass.

 

 

 

The wind roars through the street, upturning her umbrella and nearly bowling her over. The water caught in the fabric sprays out over her face, splattering into her glasses. She attempts to right it in the direction of the wind, but one of the metal bars is bent the wrong way, turned sharp against its twins. Broken. Holly groans, wrapping her arms around her head as she dodges for cover under one of the blue curtained canopies along the sidewalk. Her jeans are beginning to darken at her shins, her sleeves at the wrists, and the umbrella is as good as useless. She ducks into the building just in front of her, hoping someone inside will have a spare raincoat or umbrella. She wipes her glasses against a dry section of her shirt and shakes out her drenched hair as the door closes heavily at her heel.

 

 

 

She closes the umbrella as best she can, folding it under her arm. It turns her jacket damp and dark with rain, makes her soft cotton sleeves stick to her skin. She shivers in the doorway, against the cool blast of the air conditioning as she takes in her surroundings. A man steps out from the back room, waving his calloused hand and gesturing for her to sit down on one of the rocking chairs gathered together like a herd of animals.

 

 

 

  
"I didn't - I don't want to intrude. My umbrella broke, but if you were closing up, that's - "

"You're alright," he says. "Hell of a storm, though."

"Yeah." She perches herself on the edge of one of the chairs, planting her feet against the floor so it doesn't move. "Hell of a storm."

 

 

 

The man steps closer, holding out his hand for her to shake. It's scarred, like it's been cut open, burned. Holly hesitates before taking it in her own. "You can wait it out here, if you need to. You're fine." When he smiles, his mouth is slanted wrong. Like he's sort of forgotten how.

 

 

 

When Holly was twelve, she dug up everything she could about her father. Wikipedia articles, headlines in local newspapers, objects gathering dust in their apartment's storage unit. No stone left unturned, until she could sit down, lay out her list of facts and figures and know, unequivocally, that she knew her father. She _knew_ him. Everything of importance, at least. Everything she needed from him. So she knows the man in front of her. She knows him like she knows herself in the mirror.

 

 

 

He's older, scarred. He has a beard covering half of his face, and he has a wild look in his eyes. Like he's ready to bolt at any moment. The picture they had used in all the news articles and TV reports had been of him when he was still little more than a child, arrogant in the way young men are. Convinced of his own invincibility. Assured of his fate. This was around the time he met her father again. Like old friends, or enemies, or monsters, finding one another out on the road. The stuff of legends. The stuff of nightmares. Holly supposes he must've lost a lot in his face after that.

 

 

 

"Are you alright?" he's asking her, and she stares up at him. "You look like you've seen a ghost." He grows uncomfortable under her gaze.

"I'm fine," she says. "What?" Careful to keep her voice even and a little annoyed. He glances away, drops his eyes and draws his hand back as if he'd been burned.

"Nothing," he says. "You just look a lot like someone I knew once. She didn't like me much. Sorry, just - you look like her."

 

 

 

"You look just like your mother," Aunt Marie told her once. Holly was fifteen. Had her hands folded around her legs, her long, crooked fingers. "When she was your age, she looked exactly like you." Aunt Marie cried sometimes then. She was crying as she said it. For something she lost. For something they couldn't get back. That was the year Holly cut her hair.

 

 

 

He looks tired, his face drawn. Like he's been awake for days. She thinks he must still be living with the consequences, consequences of what he did when he was just a little older than her. Young and impressionable. Easy to trick, with a sleight of hand and a show of the light. Always looking for an escape route. Her father, Walter White, Heisenberg, whoever he was by the end of it, gave him everything. Forced on him everything. 

 

 

 

What are _you_ inheriting though? Your brother has more money than he knows what to do with, your mother works long hours to keep from coming home, Aunt Marie lives out in the middle of nowhere with the memory of her dead husband walking through the halls. Your father gave you his genius, his perfect, psychotic, stark-raving genius. The dirt under his nails. The smell of bitter chemicals in all of his clothes. You own everything he ever did, and then some. And then some. Who will you leave ruined in your wake? What blood will you spill in your father's name?

 

 

 

She attempts a smile. Nearly succeeds. And he tries to smile back. She feels sorry for him, all of a sudden. He's older, but she can still see the traces of what he was, clinging to him like a shadow. She wonders whether he would say the same for her. She's been told before that she has her father's eyes.

 

 

 

 

"Just one of those faces, I guess."

 

 

 

When she was fourteen, and the first whisperings about Heisenberg's daughter began to spread through the school like wildfire, Holly burned everything she had on the case. Newspaper clippings, baby clothes, letters from the Schwartz's. Her father's glasses, the ones her mother locked away in the armoire, hadn't caught in the fire, and Holly had had to rescue them from the flames, the glass bubbling and wire red hot in her palm. She washed the burn with cool water, watching Jesse Pinkman's mugshot curl and disintegrate through the smoke.

 

 

 

"No." He shakes his head, all measured and slow as he considers her. "You're nicer than her."

When he smiles, his mouth is crooked and warm. Even. Steady.

 

 

 

The pacing of the rain grows erratic. He busies himself in the back room, leaving Holly to her own devices in the front. She smooths her hand over the lacquered surface of the rocking chair she stumbled into, the wood handles shiny and dark. Her image in its surface is distorted, her hair a shock of yellow in the reflection. Holly watches him absently as he works. He's older, but she'll probably always see him as twenty-five, grinning dazedly at a policeman's camera. She could live with that, she thinks. She could live with that.

 

 

 

"I think the storm is letting up."

She glances out of the window. Sure enough, the water is running off of the blackened pavements in streams. Rivers running toward the gutter. The rain left falling is little more than a drizzle. She'll make it home relatively unscathed if she runs. "You're probably right."

She stands. Grabs the broken red umbrella and tucks it under her arm. In a fit of something she can't name, she crosses the room, holds out her hand for him to shake. She's just about to drop it when he takes it in his own. His skin rough and calloused compared to hers. She gives him a tiny salute with the first two fingers of her right hand. "Thanks for the shelter."

"It was nice meeting you - "

"Holly." She opens the door. "Holly White."

Her father's name trips off of her tongue more easily than she ever expected.

 

 

 

She runs home, her feet pounding against the pavement. Shining like coins in the dull light. Swirling rivulets churning against the ground like something from an oil painting. Lingering traces of the storm misting through her hair, turning it dark and slick with water. She thinks suddenly she might let it grow long. Long, blonde hair for Aunt Marie to braid. To twist through her hands, soft as silk. Like her mother's. By the time she reaches her building, the enduring scent of chemicals has dissipated with the last drops of rain.

 

 

 

 


End file.
